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Traffic

Edited by Marion Näser-Lather, Philipps University Marburg and Christoph Neubert, University of Paderborn

Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices presents a collection of texts by distinguished international media and cultural scholars that addresses fundamental relationships between the logistic, symbolic, and infrastructural dimensions of media. The volume discusses the role of traffic and infrastructures within the history of media theory as well as in a broader cultural context: Traffic is shown to constitute an important epistemological and technical principle, a paradigm for exchanges and circulations between discoursive and non-discoursive cultural practices. This opens an encompassing perspective of media ecology, and at the same time illuminates the formative power of traffic as structuring time and space: material and informational traffic creates, maintains, and undermines power, configures meaning, and facilitates appropriation and resistance.

Biographical note

Marion Näser-Lather, Dr. phil., is postdoc researcher at the Institute of European Ethnology/ Cultural Science at
Philipps University Marburg, Germany, and board member of the “Society for Social Responsibility in Science”
(GVW e.V.). Her research interests include activist movement studies, Mediterranean studies, net cultures, and
infrastructure.

Christoph Neubert, Dr. phil., is lecturer for media history at the Department of Media Studies at the University
of Paderborn, Germany, and senior member of the research training group “Automatisms.” His research
interests include media theory and history, traffic and logistics, and the history of ecology.

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